Pacific Heights (Morgan Creek Entertainment, 20th Century-Fox, 1990)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I watched the 1990 movie Pacific Heights together and I wrote a journal entry on it on August 13, 2007, just nine months before I started the moviemagg blog. Here's what I wrote about it then, posted here because Charles thought the recent Lifetime movie A Roommate to Die For reminded him of it.

The film was Pacific Heights, made in 1990 and directed by John Schlesinger from a script by Daniel Pyne. After Charles got this and I read the description on the video box — “After restoring a Victorian house and creating two rental units, a young couple (Melanie Griffith, Matthew Modine) discovers their new tenant (Michael Keaton) is a sadistic schemer who engages them in a menacing cat-and-mouse game of terror” — I joked, “Ah, so Keaton is reprising his role from Beetlejuice.” I think this was Keaton’s first film after Batman and it seemed a surprising choice at the time — that he’d readily accept a film which gave him third billing and cast him as a villain in a psychological thriller with a younger, hunkier male lead — and Charles said he was interested in the movie mainly for the aesthetics of Matthew Modine. (He’s not drop-dead gorgeous but he is tall, blond and reasonably handsome.) The opening scene features Griffith and Modine in bed together — I was amused that the costume design credit for Bridget Kelly and Ann Roth came on the screen over a shot of the two leads naked — though at one point, in an all too typical bit of Schlesinger overdirection, their images are reflected in their TV and for a brief moment one wonders if they’re actually watching a porn movie instead of having sex themselves. Their bedroom is invaded by a group of thugs who beat Drake Goodman (Modine) within an inch of his life, while their leader snarls at Patty Palmer (Griffith), “You slut! You’ll sleep with anything!” Absolutely nothing of this is made later in the film, though; it’s simply an excuse for the happy but unmarried couple (we can’t – or at least we couldn't, yet – M.G.C., 11/13/23, they won’t) to pack up from wherever they were and relocate to San Francisco, where they buy a Victorian fixer-upper and sink their entire savings into the down payment and a restoration job. Part of their plan for being able to afford the building is that in addition to their own living quarters, it comes with two ground-floor units that can be rented, and they quickly rent one to a Japanese couple, Toshio and Mira Watanabe (Mako — a great actor with almost nothing to do here — and Nobu McCarthy).

They interview an African-American man and say they’ll accept an application from him even though he’s only able to pay half the rent immediately, but they never receive his application — one of the people helping the Watanabes move steps on it, thinks it’s a piece of waste paper and throws it away — and in swoops Carter Hayes (Keaton), flashing a wallet full of $100 bills and promising to wire them the money for six months’ worth of rent immediately. They leap at the chance to rent to him, and of course he turns out to be a con artist who never pays them at all, changes the locks on the apartment almost as soon as he moves in, is almost never seen inside the building — instead the person who answers the door when our landlords knock to see what’s going on is Greg (Luca Bercovici), a Gay man who seems fairly butch out of drag but takes off a woman’s wig in our first glimpse of him, who appears to be Carter’s partner even though he has an ex-girlfriend and will romance another woman by the time the movie is over. (This is probably the nastiest movie depiction of a Bisexual since James Mason’s character in North by Northwest.) Playing on Goodman’s hot temper, Carter provokes him to attempt to drive him out illegally by turning off the electricity and water (Matthew Modine’s grin of sheer joy when he does this is the best part of his performance), then has him arrested, wins a judgment against him in court, and by the time the eviction process has run its course, has disappeared and taken all of the fixtures out of the apartment. In the meantime, Carter has also bred a host of cockroaches in his apartment and set them loose on the Watanabes in order to drive them out. Thanks to a conversation between Carter and Greg he overheard while in the basement, Goodman realizes that Carter is a con man who’s made a career of setting himself up in other people’s houses, driving them to assault him and then suing them and ending up with their homes — but it’s Patty who takes the lead in bringing him to book.

Thanks to a childhood photo Carter left behind in the apartment, Goodman realizes his real name is John Danforth and he’s the older son of an oil tycoon in Texas; his parents washed their hands of him but set up a trust to support himself wherever he went — sort of like the Bin Ladens getting rid of their black-sheep son Osama by giving him a chunk of the family fortune and sending him off to do jihad in Afghanistan — while Patty traces him down to L.A. and finds the new woman he’s romancing, Beverly Hills matron Florence Peters (played by Griffith’s real-life mother, Tippi Hedren), who has a fortune of $20 million (her house alone is worth $5 million). Tracing him to the hotel in which he’s staying, Patty claims to be his wife — not a difficult disguise since in the meantime Carter has stolen Goodman’s identity (in the pre-Internet era in which you actually had to manufacture fake ID’s and other physical documents to assume someone else’s identity) and registered as “Drake Goodman.” She calls Goodman (the real one) back in San Francisco and tells him to cancel all his credit cards, then calls room service and charges a dinner party for 18 people to Carter’s room, which brings the hotel people down on him because it leads them to run his card again and find that (now) it’s no good. There’s a nice suspense scene in which Patty escapes via the elevator while Carter is coming back to his room — and her way is blocked by an elderly man who sticks his hand in to stop the elevator at the last moment so he can get on (he’s played by director Schlesinger himself in a cameo) — and a final confrontation in which Carter attacks Patty with a staple gun and meets his death when he falls backward and is impaled on two nails left there as Goodman and Patty were attempting to repair the damage he’d caused. Pacific Heights is a gripping movie but also an oddly unmoving one; indeed, though it has Hitchcockian aspirations (the director’s cameo appearance, the Bisexual villain, casting the daughter of a Hitchcock blonde in the lead and even having Griffith victimized by a frontal assault from a bird, an in-joke reference to her mother having starred in The Birds), it’s really more like a Lifetime movie with a “name” director and major stars. (Even Hans Zimmer’s smooth-jazz soundtrack score has the aura of Lifetime about it.)

Pacific Heights is a good guilty-pleasure movie, like a lot of the Lifetime films, but I can’t imagine Schlesinger was particularly proud of it, nor can I imagine any of the participants being especially thrilled about anything but the money they were being paid to make it. It also doesn’t help that, while Michael Keaton as a con man is believable, Michael Keaton as a deeply insightful amateur psychologist who can provoke other people into behaving in the ways they have to in order to further his scheme isn’t — nor is Keaton all that credible as the man no woman (or Gay man, apparently) can resist; when he’s on Florence Peters’ yacht, romancing her as part of his latest scheme, all we can think is, “What does she see in him?” (The role really needed someone like the young Warren Beatty — the 1990 Beatty would have been too old but would still have had more babe-magnet cred than Keaton.) The script by Daniel Pyne is well constructed, perhaps a bit too well constructed — there are more “plants” than he knows what to do with (including an early scene in which Patty’s staple gun jams, as it does again when Carter tries to kill or disfigure her with it), and also a bit of what Pyne intended as high irony but just seems stupid: when Goodman and Patty go to complain to the police about Carter, the head of the precinct office is the Black guy they were going to rent to and ended up renting to Carter instead. By the standards of Lifetime this is a good movie; for a theatrical release with major stars (albeit major stars whose major stardom didn’t last long) it’s a disappointment. — 8/13/07